"The mettle of your pasture": Georgic Sensibility and English Identity in Henry V

This article argues that in Henry V, William Shakespeare represents King Harry's wartime exploits as honest, agrarian labor, revealing a georgic ethos that underpins the entire play. Amplifying Virgilian echoes in Shakespeare's language, the reading is contextualized in light of the historical and cultural circumstances that likely impelled Shakespeare in 1599 to cultivate his georgic sensibilities: the Elizabethan promotion of husbandry and tillage against the threat of enclosure; the popularity of husbandry manuals with the English reading public; and, most crucially, the war with Ireland. Arguing that Burgundy's lament on the abandoned French countryside (act 5, scene 2) is informed by Tudor accounts of Irish idleness, I show how this depiction of a neglected landscape provides a counterpoint to Shakespeare's "Englishing" of georgic labor. Finally, I suggest that through a poetics of engrafting derived from Virgil's Georgics, the play implicitly rejects the myth of English purity and instead privileges hybridity in the formation of national identity.